In 1978, the First Presidency and the Twelve, led by church president Spencer W. Kimball, declared they had received a revelation that the time had come to end these restrictions. After this revelation, people of African descent could hold priesthood offices and could be granted temple admittance.
As early as 1908, a church publication stated that blacks could not receive the priesthood because their spirits were less valiant in the pre-existence. Church leaders used this explanation until 1978,[1] when Kimball publicly refuted it; later church leaders have called the explanation a folk belief.
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young reasoned that black skin was a result of the Curse of Cain or the Curse of Ham.[2] They used these Biblical curses to justify slavery. Young believed the curse made black people ineligible to vote, marry white people, or hold the priesthood. Successive church presidents continued to use the Biblical curses to justify excluding black men from priesthood ordination and excluding black men and women from the Church's temples. The idea that black skin was a curse was not officially contradicted until 2013
Before the civil rights movement, the LDS Church's doctrine-based policy went largely unnoticed and unchallenged for about a century with the First Presidency stating in 1947 that the doctrine of the LDS Church which banned interracial marriage and black people from entering the temple or receiving the priesthood was never questioned by any of the church leaders. In the 1960s, the NAACP twice threatened to protest the LDS Church if they did not support civil rights. The first time, Hugh B. Brown made a statement in general conference supporting civil rights; the second time, the LDS Church refused to support
